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This week cycling insiders are heralding a new line of bike apparel from fabled Italian cycling manufacturer Castelli. After decades of cycle clothing innovations, Castelli has partnered with recently retired pro rider David Millar to produce an “ultra high-end” clothing line for “discerning cyclists” seeking “sartorial elegance.” The brand hopes to appeal to a “new breed” of cyclists attracted to “the cutting edge of fashion,” and the first jersey in the line retails for £190; assessing the line’s prices, Bike Radar dryly concluded that “it’s a fair bet that if you have to ask, you can’t afford it.”

Cycling producers are by no means alone in their branding appeal to consumers seeking exceptionally high-end sports garments and gear, and cultish brand appeal has complicated implications on how we view sport in general and cycling in particular. A massive industry has made cycling an increasingly lucrative industry, and it is attempting to remain profitable and accessible to the masses even as brands like the new Castelli line cultivate social and class exclusivity. Read the rest of this entry →

A host of observers argue that cycling is saddled by a “culture of fear”: apparently terrified by warnings about the dangers of cycling, many people fear biking, and even disciplined riders seem compelled to wear bright clothing, confine themselves to bike lanes, and wear safety gear, such as helmets. Many of these commentators decry a “nanny state’s” construction of cycling as a “dangerous” activity that breeds fear to hawk commodities that will make us impervious to all possible threats.

Hush’s Chris Bruntlett, for instance, captures the contorted logic (and unsubstantiated science) that helmets increase the danger to cyclists: “the mistaken sense of invincibility provided by safety gear drastically changes the dynamic between road users, and not in the favour of the cyclist. Armoured cyclists have been statistically documented to indulge in ‘overcompensation’, taking additional risks, riding quicker and more recklessly than they otherwise would. Similarly, in a scientifically proven phenomenon known as the Mary Poppins effect, motorists also conduct themselves differently around cyclists dressed in protective equipment, leaving less space when passing, and travelling notably faster around them.”

Mikael Colville-Andersen’s constructions of cyclists as the perfect aesthetic marriage of function, beauty, and style unmarred by an obtrusive helmet (image from Mikael Colville-Andersen).

The most persistent volleys against helmets have come from Copenhagenize’s Mikael Colville-Andersen, who has been lobbying against helmets for most of a decade. Colville-Andersen’s Cycle Chic blog champions stylish urban bike culture; he argues that “Copenhageners have demystified the bicycle and use it without any form of bicycle ‘gear,’” a dig at cycling style dominated by lycra, skin-tight jerseys, and helmets. Cycle Chic comes armed with its own pretentious manifesto including the directive that “I will refrain from wearing and owning any form of ‘cycle wear.’” Sociologist Dave Horton sounds much the same tone about cycling fear, but he acknowledges that anxiety about cycling is an emotional apprehension of accidents as well as the uncertainties of being a rider in public space. He laments that cycling anxieties are symptomatic of a broader “culture of fear,” with the apprehensions fostered by helmet laws typical of our deep-seated dread of everyday social life.

My hometown of Indianapolis, Indiana has a bike-friendly mayor whose office has led a push for bike lanes throughout the city, and those lanes and bike trails provide a modest foothold for cycling in the state’s capital city. Bike lanes are routinely considered confusing to motorists, and after construction of Indianapolis bike lanes in 2011, one local TV station reported that “The bicyclists, at least the ones we talked to today, know the rules. The problem is everyone else on the road beside them.”

These bike lanes are routinely the targets of local critique. Indianapolis cyclist Paul Ogden assessed the city’s bike lanes in October and concluded that “too many bicyclists entering bike lanes think they’re riding in a magical place where they no longer have to worry about the dangers of riding a bike in traffic. . . Now confined to a little strip of pavement along side of the road, the bicyclist is actually more likely to be hit at, and certainly so at intersections.” In July he attacked “bike boxes,” sounding the same mantra that “bike lanes and bike boxes often cause bicyclists fall into the false sense of security that a line on the pavement will protect them from a collision with a several thousand pound vehicle.” Read the rest of this entry →

Major Taylor in France in 1908 (image wikipedia via Bibliotheque Nationale de France).

Last week The Grio examined the impact of the color line on contemporary cycling, a discussion that reaches back to cycling’s primal 19th-century moments. On the one hand, there is an enormous amount of evidence confirming that American cyclists have always included people of color, and a 2013 study on cycling and diversity confirms that cycling’s demographics reach well beyond the caricature of lycra-clad White bourgeois. The Grio’s article covered familiar ground, and it could well describe nearly any collective of riders attracted to cycling for its health effects, competition, and sociality.

On the other hand, though, myriad cycling clubs, national advocacy groups, and the elite levels of American cycling underscore the way the color line persistently shapes the mundane realities of bike riding. The discussion of race and cycling reveals deep-seated anxieties about diversity in cycling circles, and it reaches from the elite levels of the sport to grassroots recreational riders. The discourse on color and cycling is not at all unique; instead, it is symptomatic of everyday racial divides reaching from sport to houses of worship that Americans have historically ignored or avoided. Read the rest of this entry →

Each semester I ask students in my introductory course to identify their single most significant material thing, securing a few points on the final exam simply by rationalizing why they are attached to a particular wallet, shot glass, or childhood toy. The exercise is merely meant to challenge somebody to ask reflectively what they consider to be an important thing, which is not easy to articulate. Predictably, three-quarters of the students who answer that question mechanically point to their phones, cars, and ipads. Another handful point to things that have some deep if individual meaning, like a keepsake from a grandparent, objects that are invested with some personal memories that are essentially activated by the object.

Few activities can be as seemingly innocent as a bike ride (image courtesy Annieta-Photography).

A precious few objects are strangely innocent things; that is, they are material things that essentially disappear in their description. These are the things that students rarely describe as functional or stylistic things, instead detailing the unfiltered pleasure they derive from or their experiences with the object. Bikes are such an object that appear regularly in students’ examples and one that I am especially sympathetic to and understand as a rider. A bike is embraced for the experience of the ride and not necessarily for the bike itself. When cyclists identify their bike as their favorite thing their narrative is virtually always about the freedom of riding, the physical sensation of cycling, childhood memories of biking, or the social relationships forged through riding.

There is something wonderfully idealistic and meaningful about this, but like all sport cycling remains a massive consumer industry profoundly shaped by profit. The vision of cycling as innocent recreation untouched by competitive sport is perhaps naïve, and in some hands it is hypocritical ideology. For virtually all cyclists—regardless of whether they see themselves as commuting, riding gran sportifs, circling the neighborhood, racing local triathlons, or aspiring to finish a century–a bike is somewhat romantically constructed as a simple machine that is experienced outside anything remotely approximating the sorts of competition in the pro peloton.

This innocence of bikes and professional cycling has been dealt a challenge from last week’s lifetime ban against Lance Armstrong. No single cyclist on the face of the planet is as responsible for the growth of the sport from the local cul-de-sac to the professional peloton as Lance Armstrong, whose success in the doping era fueled the growth of a host of firms like Nike, Trek, and Radio Shack as they and the governing Union Cycliste International (UCI) awkwardly looked the other way and ignored more than a half- century of performance-enhancing drugs. A legion of suburbanites captivated by Armstrong’s success and his return from cancer bought bikes, cleaned the ones they had hanging in the garage, purchased a universe of cycling accessories, and hit the roads and trails. For many of those riders in particular, Armstrong’s guilt is a genuine shock that casts him as a fraud and robs the innocence from their bike rides or the pleasure they take watching professional cyclists. For many fans and riders who knew or suspected Armstrong was part of a peloton using performance enhancing drugs, the news is at best disappointing. For all these riders and observers, though, much of the idealistic notion of sport as unmitigated “clean” competition is dealt a serious blow by the acknowledgement of the malleable morality of even sport in the face of consumer society.

Lance Armstrong in US Postal Service team kit at the Tour de France (image courtesy eugene).

We could argue that doping is simply the “culture” of professional cycling, but this is an awkward evasion of cycling’s status as a massive commercial industry that until very recently obliquely if not explicitly condoned performance-enhancing drugs. Cycling is a commercial industry that took a distinctive trajectory from the 1980’s onward, and much of this trajectory—for better and worse—was profoundly influenced by Lance Armstrong. Armstrong came to cycling at a moment when doping had reached newly systematic levels subsequently mastered by Armstrong and his teams, borrowing from a long-term acceptance of doping in the peloton and within the sport.

Armstrong’s ignoble fall in the past week reveals much about how we see competition and sport. Many firms have stood by quite sketchy characters in the wake of scandals, but Armstrong’s greatest offense may be that his dishonesty came in sport itself. While other athletes have been retained as marketing symbols in the wake of sexual assaults, shootings, and even dog fighting, Lance Armstrong violated the sacred rules of fair play that govern sport, undermining other competitors’ equity in competition, and eroding cycling itself.

Much of the appeal of sport is a romanticized attraction to sport’s teamwork and the notion of competition as being itself “innocent,” fair, and equitable in a way everyday life is not. Sut Jhally and Bill Levant have argued that we are attracted to sport because it offers an unmediated and direct competition in which we have shared and clear rules, we share the experience with competitors, and the resolution of the contest in sports are absolutely clear. In contrast, our everyday life involves competition with ambiguous and shifting rules that is much more unpleasant than sport, and we find pleasant escape in weekend bike rides, gentle jogs, or softball games, just as we relish the competitive clarity of professional sports involving athletes clearly blessed with much more skill than we have. Jhally and Levant suggest that much of our attraction to sport is an oblique critique of the sort of unpleasant competition we experience in our everyday lives.

This notion of “fair play” is a difficult fit to nearly any sport, including cycling. Since the earliest multi-day stage races, riders fatigued by extreme physical challenges over successive days were compelled to find mechanisms to energize themselves, which came at various moments from cigarettes, alcohol, coffee, peppermint, strychnine, nitroglycerine, and cocaine. The development of amphetamines in World War II found a ready audience in the peloton following the war, and anabolic steroids that mimic the effects of testosterone were being used by athletes almost immediately after World War II. In 1951, for instance, the Danish rowing team was accused of having won the previous year’s European championship while on performance-enhancing drugs, and in 1952 a series of speed skaters at the Olympics got sick because of excessive amphetamine use. In 1955 Jean Malléjac collapsed on the climb up the fabled Mont Ventoux, strongly suspected of over-consuming amphetamines. A year later, the whole Belgian team withdrew after the 14th stage citing food poisoning, but most observers believed it was the result of doping complications. In 1960, Roger Rivière took a near-fatal fall into a ravine because he had taken a large dose of the painkiller Palfium, living the remainder of his life in a wheelchair.

John D. Fair’s analysis of steroid consumption in the 1960s suggests that steroids were first taken by world-caliber American competitors in 1958, when American weightlifters were taking Dianabol. The weightlifters’ doping was driven by their ambition to keep up with Soviet competitors who had dominated the 1952 Olympics taking testosterone. Fair underscores that weightlifters and many coaches self-delusionally attributed their new successes to fresh training techniques rather than steroids, establishing a rationalization that has been repeated many times by users. Physicians like John Ziegler (who worked with the US weightlifting team) guided much of this process from the outset, treating athletes much like lab rats even as they lent such performance enhancing drugs scientific credibility: in a 1969 study, for instance, John Patrick O’Shea confirmed significant benefits from steroid consumption, one in a series of medical researchers who developed steroid consumption as part of broad training plans for elite athletes.

Like many professional cyclists, Robert Millar feels that throughout his career from 1980 to 1995 cycling was a contest of doctors engaged in chemical warfare as the whole peloton doped with more or less effectiveness. Millar’s comments in the wake of Armstrong’s suspension eerily echoed the 1972 Science article that noted “victory in the Olympics has become a question of which country has the best doctors and chemists,” and it is clear that much of the doping that occurred in cycling was commonplace in a variety of endurance and strength sports. With an honesty that may now seem shocking, Science openly acknowledged in June, 1972 that “among U.S. Olympic competitors, particularly the weight lifters, consumption of anabolic steroids is probably reaching a peak this month—in a few weeks, athletes will have to lay off the drug in order to be sure of flushing all traces out of their system before the Olympic games in August.”

Armstrong in the yellow jersey leading Joseba Beloki in 2002 (image courtesy eugene)

Riders were long unrepentant and complained that it was impossible to finish grand tours without performance enhancing drugs. Jacques Anquetil, the Tour de France winner in 1957 and 1961-1964, openly acknowledged using amphetamines in those races and refused to submit to a urine test after his 1966 victory in the single-day Liege-Baston-Liege race. This position held by much of the peloton might seem untenable from the distance. In 1960, for instance, Danish rider Knud Enemark Jensen died during the 100 KM Olympic time trial, although there is no conclusive evidence that Jensen’s death was a direct result of doping. The French introduced anti-doping codes in 1965 and conducted testing in 1966 at the Tour de France, but in 1967 rider Tom Simpson died on the Mont Ventoux climb where Jean Malléjac had collapsed in 1955. The legendary Eddy Merckx was thrown out of the Giro d’Italia in 1969 for a positive test. Nevertheless, a Science article captured the utter hypocrisy of governing bodies in 1972 when it concluded that “the gentlemen who set the rules seem happier denouncing steroids than trying to understand the trials and temptations of that push today’s athletes into drugs.”

Lance Armstrong entered cycling not long after synthetic EPO was introduced to the peloton in 1990 (Armstrong turned professional in 1992). A decade earlier, Francesco Conconi began to work with Italian Olympic endurance athletes using blood doping techniques, and by 1993 he reported to the International Olympic Committee on experiments with EPO he had conducted with 23 amateurs (later revealed to be pro riders including Stephen Roche and Claudio Chiappucci). Hemoglobin transports oxygen to the muscles, so augmenting the blood’s hemoglobin (often referred to as hematocrit) with recombinant human erythropoietin (first synthesized in 1977) theoretically can increase the blood’s oxygen-carrying capacity, oxygen intake (that is, VO2max). Conconi’s colleague Michele Ferrari worked with Lance Armstrong and was linked to the US Postal Team, as well as a host of other pro riders. Ferrari published peer-reviewed research on endurance runners as well as cyclists and was part of a movement of scientifically preparing athletes through training, nutrition, and lifestyle changes that was widely embraced by elite athletes and weekend warriors alike, and Ferrari viewed steroids as simply another tool in that training arsenal.

The sport’s links to performance-enhancing drugs—and the ways doping risked undoing the commercial fiction of cycling as equitable competition–were underscored through the 1990s. In July, 1998 a car from the Festina team was found to contain a vast range of performance-enhancing drugs including EPO on the eve of the Tour de France, and within two weeks the team was expelled from the Tour (won by acknowledged doper Marco Pantani). In 2004 doping on the Cofidis team caught the time trial world champion David Millar, and in 2006 several high-profile riders including former champion Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso were expelled from the Tour in an investigation referred to as Operation Puerto. During Puerto, physician Eufemiano Fuentes was found with 100 blood bags and coded documents from professional cyclists reputed to include Alberto Contador, Alejandro Valverde, Tyler Hamilton, and Jan Ullrich, all of whom were subsequently penalized for doping violations.

In 2011 Lance had secured the most lofty of all honors: being a wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s in Hollywood (images courtesy Loren Javier).

In the midst of all this, Lance Armstrong and his teams dominated the peloton, and their techniques for securing those wins illuminate that it is infeasible to accommodate ambiguous athletic ethics with the ideological clarity of fair competition used to market sport. On the one hand, Armstrong’s fanatic devotion to scientific training and his confident arrogance won him many fans (even as it alienated many others). Armstrong captivated an American audience watching the Tour de France on television, potentially reaching the lucrative American recreational market long left untouched (Greg LeMond was the first non-European Tour winner in 1986). Armstrong’s marketing was eased by exceptionally sympathetic American coverage, and Armstrong was a dynamic commercial face for a host of firms. On the other hand, Armstrong hypocritically made much of his appeal his defiant resistance to doping. Nike and Armstrong defiantly asked “What am I on? I’m on my bike.” In the service of Livestrong Armstrong told a noble lie, but it was nonetheless a distortion only important because people in terrible moments placed their trust in Armstrong and his message. The protestations of the likes of Nike, Trek, and cycling’s governing bodies are hypocritical, but we expect such dishonesty in commercial space and are less willing to tolerate it in the context of a sporting contest.

Armstrong resolutely and without challenge ruled over a team much as team leaders like Merckx, Anquetiel, and Bernard Hinault had before him. The focus on this powerful individual personality suited advertisers and many casual cycling observers very well, but the sport is increasingly a team effort. The teams led by Armstrong clearly were dominated by his agenda and resolution to win, attributes that are good for elite athletes, but in the complicated moral muddle to which cycling had been reduced, Armstrong was among the many cyclists who gave in to the lure of victory and the paranoid concern that non-dopers stood no competitive chance. For those competitors who obeyed their moral vision of equitable competition like Bradley McGee, Armstrong’s story simply underscores the opportunities that were thieved from them. Like any elite athlete Armstrong arrogantly believed he was the best athlete in the peloton, and he certainly was on most days, but there is always doubt in the mind of any athlete or weekend warrior, and training, nutrition, the best bikes and gear, and, yes, doping attempted to manage the uncertainties.

For the purposes of moral crusaders who hope to make cycling appear clean and rebuilt, Armstrong becomes simply a single person on which we can pin the blame and ignore the vast administrative apparatuses, commercial mechanisms, phalanxes of physicians, and long heritage of expecting superhuman performances from cyclists. When the UCI’s Pat McQuaid intoned that “Lance Armstrong has no place in cycling, and he deserves to be forgotten in cycling,” McQuaid hypocritically ignored his own organization’s failure to be better stewards for the sport or to acknowledge that Armstrong’s phenomenal success had been exceptionally beneficial for the UCI. Pinning this whole heritage on Armstrong alone or painting his story as unique is at best wrong and at worst an inelegant lie hoping to distract attention away from UCI.

The power of Armstrong’s cancer survival and his Tour victories would have made him a good mouthpiece for any cause, but given his driven personality it made him an exceptionally strong and effective leader for Livestrong. Few material objects are more universally visible than Livestrong wristbands (including many tattoos), but now they and bikes are trapped in the revealing picture Armstrong’s story tells about cycling. Livestrong was so firmly linked to Armstrong’s personality and story that its unraveling risks undermining all of the good foundations built by many supporters. The loss of Armstrong as a voice for cancer research may be more disappointing than any other dimension of this narrative.

How many of us might have contemplated doping to secure the chance to simply ride our bike all day? This is of course a contrived question, but many riders cling tenaciously to the fringes of professional cycling because, like many of us, they love to ride and enjoy the feeling of being with friends and competitors on a bike pushing themselves and each other. Bikes have never been truly innocent, trapped in a world of commodity ideologies like any other thing. Yet bikes’ meanings are never determined by such discourses any more than any marketing discourses dictate how we see and view things. But it will be difficult to see bikes simply as innocent things.

Today the 99th annual Tour de France begins its second of three weeks that traverse 2173 miles of France and its neighbors. A pro cycling race is not quite the same experience as everyday cycling, but both are distinctive material experiences shaped by an interesting fusion of aesthetics, spatiality, motion, place, sound, body, and commodities, and they might just provide us an example of how to think about archaeological materiality in broad and ambitious terms.

One approach to analyzing the Tour de France or cycling in general would be to assess all its effects. For instance, at an economic level alone the impact of cycling is enormous: In the UK, for instance, 3.7 million bikes were sold in 2010 alone alongside 853 million Pounds of accessories (i.e., 1.3 billion dollars). The National Bicycle Dealer’s Association estimated that in 2011 the American cycling industry was worth $11 billion and included the sale of 15.7 million bikes. Like all professional sport, the Tour de France is fundamentally an advertisement for the companies that sponsor professional cycling teams (e.g., the British TV station Team Sky leads the team competition as of today), the communities that host stages of the race (e.g., the ski town of La Planche des Belles Filles on July 7th), and a broad range of branded cycling commodities (e.g., staple American bike shop brands Specialized, Trek, Giant, and Cannondale all are ridden by Tour teams, and every possible accessory from sunglasses to shoes to helmets are relentlessly branded and marketed). Many of these team brands do not have all that much cachet (let alone name recognition) in the US outside cycling circles—after all, how many Americans have strong feelings about Rabobank, Saxo Bank/Tinkoff Bank, or Francais des Jeux? The most visible American team this year is Garmin-Sharp, but certainly the universe of companies manufacturing cycling accessories for the Tour recognize that the US is one of their most important markets.

The peloton whizzes by in the 2011 Tour of Britain in London.

Nevertheless, the fascinating material experience of a bike race in particular and cycling in general are often overlooked. A cycling peloton (i.e., the group of cyclists) has a very distinctive material presence combining sight, sound, and physical sensation. A peloton is a panoply of colors in large part because every rider is a moving billboard, much like race cars, so a passing peloton is a striking rainbow whizzing by at 25 miles an hour or more. Races like the Tour de France are of course tourism advertisements as well, so they pass through absurdly beautiful landscapes like the sunflower fields in France or the Tour of Britain’s London stage that heighten the aesthetics of the peloton and play especially well on television.

Archaeologists rarely address the relationship between sound and materiality, but the peloton rainbow has a very distinctive acoustics of rapidly spinning wheels and gears (followed by the trailing caravan of support vehicles) that reverberates uniquely in different spaces (e.g., races in cities sound much different than those in open spaces), and a massive peloton sounds different than a long single line. Along with that color and sound comes a powerful physical feeling of wind in the wake of a peloton passing, yet even one rapid bike creates a surprisingly strong gust of breeze. And of course part of the material spectacle of cycling is the pure sensation of speed that is especially impressive for a motionless person standing at roadside.

Try to identify your favorite brand as it flies by in a 35-mph rainbow.

Start and finish lines are peopled by a vast caravan of colorful support vehicles that carry bikes and a host of support personnel, and those spaces offer one of the few places fans can actually see a bike and rider for more than a few instants. In the Tour, for example, fans can camp out for days to literally see a peloton pass by within less than a minute, though a caravan of vehicles pass by ahead of the riders circulating freebies for patient fans. Cyclists spend vast hours in the saddle each day, and along the way they eat an enormous amount of food and drink gallons of fluid, leaving behind a wake of food wrappers, empty bottles, and assorted debitage that gets snapped up by fans. These roadside spots and the start and finish lines become social spaces as fans mill about awaiting the bike race itself, and in many races the start and finish lines become places to purchase a universe of branded goods.

One material thing emphasized by these start and finish line areas is the bodies of cyclists themselves, which are for the most part not really discernible in a peloton (see Brian Gilley’s analysis of cyclists’ bodily subjectivity). Like all professional athletes, cyclists are genetic anomalies, and lifetimes of riding maximize their strength-to-weight ratio by providing them with strikingly thin bodies and relatively big thighs that are further crafted based on whether an individual cyclist is a specialized climber, sprinter, or all-around rider. This is all especially clear when cyclists are moving about in the same space as normally proportioned fans. The miracle of bib shorts and bike clothes can compress many typical bodies into something loosely approximating a professional cyclist’s body, but short of genetic manipulation most of us can never approach the physical form that is typical in the pro peleton. Nevertheless, even a recreational rider will probably get a little lean, and they almost certainly will develop a distinctive cyclist’s tan beginning at mid-thigh to sock line, extending from short-sleeves to wrist (i.e., between jersey and gloves), and leaving a bright temple and cheek halo around sunglass frames.

Even club rides like the 2011 Hilly Hundred in Bloomington, Indiana includes scores of cyclists in professional and branded garb.

The aesthetics of a pro peloton are mirrored in many local bike shops lined with an ever-expanding universe of visually striking jerseys, and nearly any club ride or weekend ride will include many of the same jerseys found in the pro peloton. What the local bike shop will also confirm is that cycling is accessory-rich: Beyond the universe of pedals, rims, and parts that can update or improve any given bike, a well-equipped bike can include bike computers, lights, bags, bottles, and an astounding breadth of clothes. And anybody whose only bike-purchasing experience was in a department store will be stunned to find a universe of bikes for nearly every conceivable kind of riding and body type, with time trial bikes, mountain bikes, road bikes, “hybrid” bikes for commuting, and a host of other bikes distinguished by frame materials, size, and myriad details.

The pro cycling peloton is not a piece of traditional archaeological data, but then relatively few pieces of contemporary material culture conform to facile definitions of archaeological materiality. Rethinking how the experience of cycling encompasses sound, vision, space, motion, and something beyond bike frames and narrowly defined things provides one more mechanism to help us re-think how to look at materiality in broader terms in the past.

One of the most politicized pieces of material culture in America is bike lanes, those ephemeral strips in the street that for some reason summon forth class tensions, nationalist ideology, and consumer and environmental politics (albeit concealed within rants on the inconveniences and economic injustices imposed by bike lanes and cyclists). INDYCOG, a non-profit Indianapolis bicycle advocacy group that promotes bike commuting and recreational riding, today came out with a thorough and measured analysis of a series of new bikes lanes that has been greeted locally with emotional letters-to-the-editor and complaints that apparently were made directly to INDYCOG as well. Some drivers are justifiably a little confused by the bike lanes and a little uncomfortable with the idea of bikes alongside their cars, and some of the lanes could use better signage and spacing. Some cyclists are not big fans of bike lanes either (e.g., see this blog from an Indy rider or the BikeNoob blog). But much of this discussion is really an emotional dispute over the public space that cars have long ruled over without question in cities like Indianapolis, and it involves politics that would seem to have nothing to do with otherwise innocuous painted lines, bikes, or how we get to work.

On December 5th, The Indianapolis Star had a relatively measured analysis of how bikes lines have been received, but it was greeted with a burst of online responses, and emboldened by their anonymity those commentators prophesied the imminent likelihood that cars would soon be outlawed and replaced by ill-behaved yuppies on carbon frames. The day before Salon did a thoughtful piece on the presumption that cyclists are all elitist snobs, musing over the arguments made in a New Yorker piece that lamented the ever-expanding swath of bike lanes carving up New York roadways. The New Yorker essay was greeted by a rush of cranky blog responses (there are an enormous number of cycling blogs) that took offense at the economic implications of bike lanes, the environmental dimensions of riding, the presumed traffic snarls created by the cycling hordes, and similar sorts of issues (for instance, see The Economist response). The New Yorker piece by John Cassidy repeated a commonplace caricature that cyclists apparently all see drivers as “Suburban, reactionary, moron[s]” and opposed to cyclists, who are “Urbane, enlightened, sophisticate.” Cassidy also sounded the tired suggestion that cyclists are all intent on replacing cars with bikes. Comments on the Indianapolis Star piece spent much of their time lamenting the behavioral shortcomings of cyclists, who have sometimes viewed the rules of the road as suggestions; in Philadelphia, a crackdown on cycling scofflaws netted 600 tickets over two months this summer. But in the end the tenor of much of this public discourse on bike lanes devolves to overwrought and ambiguous caricatures by drivers who feel threatened by bike lanes and cyclists who are unable to see how to co-exist on the road in a car culture.

One of the comments responding to Cassidy suggested “Honestly, if you love driving so much, please move to the midwest. You can get all the driving in you want out there, killing the environment all the while. Plus, there are lots of parking spots for any sort of heap you want to drive.“ This somewhat stereotypical picture of the Midwest is perhaps rhetorical, but it is certainly true that Indianapolis is firmly married to car culture, and bike lanes seem to be perceived as a frontal assault on the primacy of cars in the most public shared spaces in the city. Bike lanes in Broad Ripple, for instance, have become flashpoints among observers who accept the money youth bourgeois pump into the neighborhood’s bars and shops, but they seem less excited about the politics and behavior of the bikers who pass through or live in Broad Ripple. Bike lanes are routinely reduced to the favored vehicles of a young intelligentsia resisting car culture if not all American values, and in Indianapolis that stereotype has been greeted with a bitter reception. Bike lane critics constantly harp on cyclists’ boorish on-road behavior (often in overwrought and truly idiotic terms), and some riders certainly do get defensive and over-react; if you ride enough you’ll deal with aggressive or distracted motorists whose effort to clip a few minutes from their commute puts a cyclist in real danger, and sometimes cyclists do get a little touchy. Some cyclists have responded creatively if in modestly rude terms, such as the Toronto page Look at the Asshole in the Bike Lane or a New York cyclist who was ticketed for leaving the bike lane and made a film on his subsequent rides in the bike lane. But the broad-brushed rejection of all cyclists (or for that matter all drivers) is shortsighted.

Cycling in Indianapolis is actually in pretty good shape: a NUVO article on cycling in 2011 inventories the new bike lanes, the growing racing scene, and support for commuters like the downtown bike hub. The concrete number of people who actually cycle commute in Indianapolis or anywhere else remains pretty modest, with an The Atlantic Cities report placing Indianapolis’ number of bike commuters in 2009 at 0.5% of the population, although that was a 150% increase over a decade earlier. So it is interesting that such a small number of people and nothing more substantial than painted lines sharing the roadway with a slow-moving bike can strike such apprehension in so many drivers.

About me

I am a historical archaeologist who studies consumer culture, focusing on material consumption and the color line and the relationship between popular culture and contemporary materiality. I am a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI); Docent in Historical Archaeology at the University of Oulu (Finland); Past-President of the Society for Historical Archaeology (2012-2013); and a cycling geek.